The Canadian

The Challenge

Paul Guilbault was born January 21, 1798, in the parish of St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie (Joliette) and baptized the following day. His father was François Guilbault, of St-Paul; his mother was Marie Archange Larivière. They had married at L’Assomption on February 7, 1786. The baptismal record is clear, well-preserved, and indexed in the PRDH as individual no. 499642. It is also, in the Quebec parish record system, the last thing Paul Guilbault ever appears in.

There is no Quebec marriage record. No Quebec burial record. No occupation designation in a child’s baptismal entry — because no children appear in Quebec with him as father. No census appearance in the province. After January 22, 1798, the man who would spend his working life in the fur trade and settle permanently in Oregon leaves the Quebec parish registers entirely.

The searches behind that statement covered the parish record system: PRDH-IGD, and the Lavaltrie, L’Assomption and Lanaudière registers. The notarial record is a separate archive, and it is where his working life begins. On 30 December 1819, before the notary John Gerbrand Beek at Montreal, “Paul Guibeau” and Louis St-Onge, both “de l’Assomption,” engaged together to McTavish, McGillivrays & Co. and Pierre de Rocheblave as milieux, to winter three years in the North-West, at 700 livres each, with fifteen piastres in hand and fifteen more on departure. Neither man could sign.

The act gives no age and no father, so it does not name him outright. But he was twenty-one, of that parish, and in the Athabasca the following season — and the wage connects the contract to the account. Montreal contracts were written in livres of Quebec currency; the North West Company kept its books in its own livre, worth half as much. Its own claim against the Franklin expedition states both rates. Seven hundred livres in Montreal is 350 in the company’s books — the exact wage of this Paul’s account.

The silence is not for want of records in the family. The generations above Paul are thoroughly documented in the PRDH:

Paul did not invent this career. The SHSB contracts database records an engagement of 1 May 1792, before the notary Chaboillez, for Guilbeau, François, of L’Assomption parish, as second gouvernail to Sault-Ste-Marie, at 180 livres with 100 advanced, for the agent A. Henry. François Guilbault had married Marie Archange Larivière at L’Assomption in 1786; their son Joseph was born in October 1792, conceived about four months before this contract was signed.

Paul’s father was in the trade six years before Paul was born. Recruitment in this family runs down the household, not across the parish — which changes what Paul’s own departure means. He was not a boy who left; he was a boy raised in a house that a man left from.

Paul’s father François (b. 1760) and the brothers Gabriel Guilbault père (b. 1762) and Paul Guilbault père (b. 1761) were first cousins — François descending from Charles Thomas (b. 1727), the brothers from Gabriel (b. 1731), both sons of the 1727 marriage. Paul (b. 1798) is therefore first cousin once removed to each of them.

Gabriel père was a hivernant: three of his children were born in the pays d’en haut and carried down to St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie for baptism in October 1798, where the priest styled him voyageur et maintenant agriculteur. He married Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe at Oka in 1801. His brother Paul père stayed in Lanaudière — the parish and notarial record places him at home through the years of the Athabasca accounts — and he died a cultivateur at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie in 1831. Their children and grandchildren remained in Quebec.

Paul (b. 1798) shared the Athabasca department in 1820–21 with another man the clerks called Paul — Paul Gibeau, of the 500 / 617.14 account, still unidentified. The other Paul’s later life is unknown. This Paul did not come back.

The Breakthrough

Read the direction of that closing entry. He drew 446 livres of goods against 350 livres of wages and entered 1821 owing the company 96 livres. That was ordinary practice for keeping a man engaged — but it is the opposite of money in hand, and it should not be described as earnings.

The two balances differ — 96 in the general ledger, 80.8 in the Athabasca blotter — and that is not a discrepancy to be reconciled. They are different books kept for different purposes at a post and at head office. The figure that identifies the man is the wage, and in both volumes it is 350.

The route those entries describe is itself the record of a season: an account opened at Fort William on the Great Lakes, carried west into Slave Lake, charged at Fort Providence, and closed at Fort Chipewyan. The 1821 settlement register lists him in the Athabasca department and shows his engagement transferred to the Hudson’s Bay Company at the merger rather than cancelled by it. He was twenty-two.

Every line foots, and every year begins where the last one ended. That is identification by arithmetic: no clerk’s spelling enters into it. It also shows where the merger sent him — not back to Athabasca, but west over the mountains into New Caledonia, the district of McLeod Lake and Fort St. James, where he stayed through 1826 before moving onto the Columbia list. The other Paul of the 1821 settlement, Paul Gibeau of the 500 / 617.14 account, was carried into the same books in Athabasca, at exactly twice his own figures.

Peace River: A Canoe Voyage from Hudson’s Bay to Pacific, the journal of Governor Simpson’s 1828 voyage, kept by Archibald McDonald and published at Ottawa in 1872.

Which Guilbault? At least three men of the name could be meant, and nothing in the three entries distinguishes them. Paul “the Canadian” is a candidate on Gauthier’s service dates, which cover 1828. Hilaire Guilbault is documented in western service in the following two decades, though his recorded service begins in 1838. And Joseph Guilbault, born 21 October 1792 — this Paul’s own elder brother — has no marriage and no death recorded in the PRDH, the only son in the sibling set with neither, and is under active investigation as a Quebec-vanished voyageur of exactly the right generation.

Paul’s own account now narrows the odds without settling them. It places him in New Caledonia and Western Caledonia from 1821 to 1826 — the district of the McLeod Lake portage — and on the Columbia list in 1826–27. Of the three, he is the man the company’s books put closest to that portage. The journal still does not give a forename, and this page does not supply one.

What the entries establish stands regardless of which man is meant, and it is worth having: he had independent charge of four Indigenous carriers rather than travelling in an officer’s party; he was provisioned separately from the fort, with pemmican cached for the return; and he completed the round trip with every load delivered. That is the work of an experienced interior transport man operating on his own authority.

Simpson’s party that season included James Douglas, later Governor of British Columbia; the chief factor William Connolly; the surgeon Richard Hamlyn; and Colin Fraser, Simpson’s piper. The gentlemen kept the journals, and the carriers appear in them by surname or not at all. That core asymmetry is the whole problem this case study is built around — which makes any inference about the forename completely speculative.

The connection between the two men is not an inference from a printed page. In January 1843 Hilaire stood as godfather to Paul’s son François, with his own wife Louise as godmother — a formal, recorded bond of spiritual kinship between the two households in a single register entry.

The Result

The Early Oregonians Database (Oregon State Archives) records Guilbeau, Paul: born ca. 1800, died ca. 1849, arrived Oregon 1833 — five years after the McDonald journal placed a Guilbault on the McLeod Lake portage. Munnick’s biographical annotation has him sent from Fort Walla Walla in 1831 to join John Work’s Snake Country brigade. A provisional land grant at Champoeg (Vol. 3, Pg. 079) was filed September 7, 1846. He did not live to patent the claim.

Record M-18 in the Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest (Vancouver Vol. I) documents Paul Guilbault’s marriage to Caty Sakaïan, Walla Walla by nation, on December 29, 1838, at Fort Vancouver. Paul was in the service of the Honourable Company of Hudson’s Bay, domiciled at Fort Vancouver. Witnesses: James Douglas, Esquire, and William Fraser Tolmie, Esquire. Three pre-nuptial children were recognized as legitimate at the ceremony: François (aged 6), Louis (aged 2), and Paul (aged 7 months). Neither spouse could sign; both made the mark of a cross. Caty was baptized the same day as B-213, the entry immediately preceding the marriage in the same register.

Munnick’s annotation states that Caty bore Paul six children. The registers identify four by name, across five years:

• François — recognized at the 1838 marriage, then baptized as B-876 on January 29, 1843, with Hilaire Guilbeau as godfather and Louise Walla Walla as godmother
• Louis — recognized at the marriage; baptized B-46, November 29, 1840, aged 5½ years
• Paul — recognized at the marriage; baptized B-47, November 29, 1840, aged 2½ years
• Marie — B-41, baptized June 20, 1841, born May 29; godfather Michel Cotnoir, godmother Mathilde Fagnant

Caty Walla Walla died in 1848.

B-876 makes documentary what the Gauthier compilation only implied. When Paul’s son François was baptized in January 1843, Hilaire Guilbeau stood as his godfather, with Hilaire’s own wife Louise Walla Walla as godmother. Hilaire had married Louise at Vancouver County in April 1842, nine months earlier, adopting four children of the bride at the same ceremony (M-2). The two second cousins once removed were not merely in the same Oregon community — they were godparents to each other’s households.

The Munnick index for Vancouver Vol. I places Paul Guilbault on more than fifteen separate pages — as father, as godfather, as witness at burials (S-3, S-4, S-8, S-9, S-11, S-17 across 1840–1841), and as present at baptisms through 1843. He stood godfather in July 1839 to Michel, child of the engagé Louis, Iroquois dit le frisé, and to Pierre, son of Thomas Tawakon, Iroquois, and Françoise — the woman he would himself marry nine years later. He was a witness at the burial of Cowlitz, Willamette and Flathead people through 1840 and 1841. The index is a map of a man embedded in his community.

After Caty’s death, Paul married Françoise on November 5–6, 1848, in Marion County, Oregon. Munnick identifies her as Cayuse; the Early Oregonians Database records her as Walla Walla, born ca. 1810, under the aliases Française and Louise. The conflict is noted and not resolved here. Her record documents three marriages: Thomas Tewatcon in 1839, Paul Guilbeau in November 1848, and Laurent Sauvé on April 9, 1850. She appears in the 1850 Marion County census and survived to the 1880 census in Wasco County. Her remarriage in April 1850 sets the outer bound on Paul’s death.